Fakers (Licking Thicket 1)

I poked my toe at a rock in the dirt. “I grew up in a town like this. Well, not as great as this, but a small town where everyone knew everyone.”

“They must miss you very much back there.”

I bit back a laugh. “No, sir. Not a bit. Unfortunately, Homer isn’t as accepting of people’s differences as the Thicket is.”

“Ahh.” He looked back at the sign for a moment. “We weren’t always this accepting either. I’m sure Brooks has told you about how uncomfortable he felt growing up. If he’d had friends like you back then, maybe he wouldn’t have felt so alone.”

I peered over at him in the darkness, lit only by the sign’s uplighting. What did that mean? Did he know I was gay? Or did he just know I was different somehow? “Friends like me?”

“There’s something about you that seems to relax him more than I ever saw before. At first I thought it was Paul, that maybe being in a relationship was what had caused the change, but then I remembered the night he arrived and how buttoned-up and stressed he still was. No, it wasn’t until he started spending time with you and Ava that he calmed down. So then I thought it was Ava, that maybe he was back to feeling a connection with her somehow.”

“Brooks is gay, sir,” I couldn’t help saying. “That’s very real.”

“I know it, son.” He stopped talking for a bit and smiled softly at the sign. “Do you know what he did when he saw this sign for the first time?”

I shook my head. My heart was ka-thunking in my chest, and I was afraid to speak for fear it would fly out of my mouth.

“He crashed his car. He doesn’t even know he did it. He yanked the car over to the side of the road and sideswiped the mirrors off Becky Dodd’s jeep and Mr. Silverman’s Buick in the process. They called me asking if he was having some kind of mental break. Becky said that he knelt down and ran his hands over this part here like it was the second coming of Christ.” He crouched down and pointed to the 2010 Licking Lope trophy engraved with Brooks’s name. Ava had given it to me from the shelf in her room where he’d apparently stuck it that day after winning it for her. The cow horn glinted in the cool light.

My throat felt too tight and my tongue too thick, so I stood there without speaking. If he so much as mentioned Brooks, I was going to burst into tears like an asshole. There was no solution to this problem. I lived and worked in LA. He lived and worked in New York. And his pipe dream about moving to the Thicket was just that. If he gave up his career for me, he’d resent me. And more than that? If I gave up my career for him, I’d resent him too. Especially if things didn’t work out. That was way too much stress to put on a six-day relationship, no matter what my heart said.

Mr. Johnson stood up and put his hands back in his pockets, cool as can be. “Did you ever hear the story about how I stole Cindy Ann right out from under her parents’ noses at the Blue Iris Debutante Ball?”

I wasn’t in the mood for a folksy story, but I also wasn’t about to be rude to Mr. Johnson. “No, sir.”

He nodded. “You see, she was all set to get engaged to Daniel… aw, hell, I can’t remember his last name now. Something stuck-up and Nashville snotty. Anyway, they’d been Mr. and Mrs. Perfect all through school, kind of like Brooks and Ava, you see?”

I bit my tongue to keep from giving him more of my thoughts on the topic than he’d bargained for.

“But I knew just because that pair looked good on paper, didn’t mean it was the right thing. I’d met her several times before at events leading up to the ball. My cousin Brenda had asked me to be her escort for all of those fancy parties that summer in Nashville, and I’d gone to every single one of them. I’d like to have died at how boring those things were, and I’d never in my life had so much sweet tea and rubber chicken. But the afternoon of one of those stupid things, I’d looked up and seen this beautiful girl sitting by herself on a bench under a tree.”

He sighed and smiled. Something about the gesture made my chest constrict. “She was wearing a little pout, and I wanted to see if I could piss her off and make her even madder.” He laughed. “I don’t even know why. Maybe because I’d gotten it into my head that most of those girls were spoiled princesses. Turned out, I couldn’t have been further from the truth. When I went over there, she gave me a bunch of polite small talk while I kept pushing her. Finally, I saw one damned teardrop fall out of her eye.”